Margo And The Birds On Fire
by HighlyFunctioningSociocpath
Summary: This story is just about Margo and how she began to think about paper towns and what is real to her. John Green writes so much better than I do, so please do not get angry at my inability to capture Margo's inner monologue. I do not own anything! :)


When i was little, maybe eleven or twelve, back before i started thinking about paper things, my Dad bought me a telescope. i think he wanted me to be an astronomer or something. It was around the time he started calling me MargoRothSpiegelman! Instead of Margo. Roth. Spiegelman. Like,

"MargoRothSpiegelman! Get down from there!" Or, "MargoRothSpiegelman! Stop doing that!"

i didn't like it. The name, not the telescope. Margo was okay. i liked it when my parents called me Margo. But MargoRothSpiegelman! felt like a reminder. It was like every time they called my name like that, they were reminding me that i was a Spiegelman. "Don't do that Margo! You're a Spiegelman! Additionally, we are also Spiegelmans, so anything you do reflects poorly on our superb parenting skills."

i don't know why he bothered with the telescope.

i was never going to be an astronomer.

But i think the telescope was important to who i became in the end. It started to make me into my very own Margo. Roth. spiegelman. So I'm going to tell you its story, the story about me and the telescope and the birds on fire.

It was a brass telescope with tiny blue rhinestones around the edge of the lens. If anything was to be said about it, it would be that it was pretty. Not beautiful. Pretty in the way Becca Arrington used to be, like the quality of it didn't matter so long as it sparkled. It came in the mail in a big brown package that said FRAGILE, a package which I later stowed in my closet. I don't know why. It seemed like a great thing to do at the time, similar to all ideas that turn out badly.

When my Dad hauled it through the door, My mom and I gathered on the landing and watched him. Rosie toddled after us, her pudgy little legs shaking with the effort. Dad looked really proud of himself, lugging this massive FRAGILE telescope box and grinning.

"Margo," he announced, "I've bought something for you."

I remember being probably the most excited I've ever been in my life. It's exciting to a kid, getting a package that could have ANYTHING inside of it on your doorstep. And then finding out that whatever is inside is yours? I mean, wow. We carried the box to the kitchen table, where we set it down. Mom got annoyed because it would scratch the expensive wood or something, so then we put it on the floor. Dad pulled out a box cutter and flicked it open and sliced down the centre of the FRAGILE box. Then he opened it, and I got my telescope.

I think I remember liking it. I was eleven and I liked sparkles and stars, and this telescope had sparkles and was made to look at stars, so it was perfect. I carried it up to my room and put the box in my closet. Then I put the telescope next to my bed, pointing out at the window and the night sky. I leaned over and looked through, but I couldn't see anything. So I went downstairs and had dinner, and then I watched Harry Potter. Then I went to bed.

The telescope sat there for four years.

They were four years I'd rather forget.

I started high school, where I discovered that people thought I was pretty and funny. So I became popular.

I took up jogging. I would go down around Jefferson Park with my earbuds in, listening to Oasis and the Shins and Billy Bragg. Then I would buy a coffee at this second rate cafe and throw it out just before I got home. I never learned to like the taste.

I ignored Quentin. He was easy to ignore, honestly. He never mentioned the dead guy in the park again, and neither did I.

I climbed onto the roof at night and practiced handstands. I wanted to be a trapeze artist one day, so I sometimes went down to the park at night and swung on this old jungle gym that was too unsafe to let kids climb on anymore.

I read books. Some were good. Some weren't.

And I looked at the stars. They were interesting. I didn't use my telescope. I just lay on the grass and counted until I gave up or fell asleep. I loved them. I decided that stars were the most beautiful thing in the universe, the tiny sparkles that dotted the night sky and sometimes fell down. I loved the fact that they were always there, even in the day when their light was invisible to us. I wrote about them. I sketched them. I was obsessed, in a way.

When I was really young, I'd had this theory about stars. I used to watch birds sit on telephone wires and fly away. I wondered how high they could fly, whether they could make it above the clouds or up to the atmosphere. I later read one chapter of a science book for kids about the atmosphere, which explained to me that anything travelling at speed through it will catch alight. So my young brain put two and two together and decided that birds eventually went so high that they caught fire. Essentially, I firmly believed that stars were birds. Shooting stars were flying back to earth. The others were still going further ahead.

When I got older, I learned that my theory was obviously false. But I wanted stars to stay a mystery to me, just to remain those sparkles in the sky that came out at night. I didn't want to know what made them, I didn't want to know what they looked like up close. Because in my head, they were still birds on fire. I thought that things were prettier from far away. I was happy that stars looked fake to me, animated, because I never wanted to find out the truth about them. That they weren't magical, and that I wasn't magical, and that nothing was magical. That all of it was just paper thin, ready to blow over in a storm.

The storm came suddenly.

At the end of the four years in which the telescope sat gathering dust, I developed a crush on a boy. It doesn't matter who anymore. The only thing that matters in this story is that I asked him out and he said yes. It wasn't serious; my only serious boyfriend was later, and the only serious one in the relationship was him. At first. No, this boy was different. I was convinced that he was like me, convinced that he was different and misunderstood and interesting. He and I used to listen to music and walk around outside and read Whitman's poetry. We'd get ice cream and go swimming and talk about books and our dreams for the future and the adventures we'd have together.

And then things changed.

Becca was having a party to celebrate her birthday, and of course she invited me, as I was her apparent closest friend. I was also her gateway to popularity, but that's another story altogether.

Her parents weren't home, as was to be expected.

There was drinking.

And other things.

I hung out with Becca and Lacey and some of the other popular people for most of the time, which was alright. I didn't drink anything except Dr Pepper that night. I mean, I was fifteen. And not stupid. Lacey didn't drink either, and the both of us mostly just laughed at the people acting like idiots. It was fun. Until it wasn't.

At the end of the night, my boyfriend of the time period was nowhere to be seen. Becca and I went through her house to look for him; the basement, the main floor, and the upstairs were empty. And then we got to the attic bedroom.

I screamed bloody murder when I saw him. And the other girl. They sprang apart like I'd shocked them, which I guess I really did.

"Margo, please-" was all he said before I started running down the stairs, through the hallway, and out of the house. I made it to the lawn before I threw up. I was dry heaving for an hour in the yard, watching as the cars drove by, pleasantly oblivious to everything.

My world had started crashing down.

My magical relationship wasn't magical anymore. It was paper thin, just like everything else, and it had fallen over.

I racked my brain for a moment, thinking of all my misconceptions about things. What else did I think was magical? What other false impressions did I have? My boyfriend was fake, so what else was fake? Who else was fake? I didn't want paper love and paper friends and paper families anymore. I needed things to be real. I needed real friends, real ideas, things that mattered beyond what mattered to everyone else.

And then it came to me.

The stars.

I needed to see the real stars, not my birds on fire. The giant balls of gas and heat, not my paper lanterns. I needed my telescope.

I sprinted home and snuck through my window. I grabbed the sparkly telescope and slid down the roof and onto the lawn. I set it up on the tripod.

I looked through to see the things I had dreamed about and romanticized my entire life.

And they were paper too.

Ugly.

Two dimensional, scientific, measurable objects that occasionally exploded.

My beautiful birds were not birds after all.

I climbed back through my window and grabbed the FRAGILE box from my closet, and I slid back down the roof and ran to Jefferson Park. There were four security cameras that I had counted there in the past, but who cared? I opened the large box and clambered inside. And I lay there, crying and FRAGILE in the dark. None of it mattered. No one cared about anything real anymore. My paper town was full of paper people on their paper phones, paper families in paper photos. The stars were fake from far away and ugly up close, and so were the people.

So was I.

That's how I realized how fake the town was. And how I needed to get away.

I huddled in my FRAGILE box, worried that my paper self might blow away in the wind.


End file.
